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On ad supported websites from a developer’s perspective

November 10, 2015 by rememberlenny

Developers and editorial teams can work together to create a great product.

I’ve worked at media companies for over three years. Watching the recent discussions about ad-blockers, advertiser’s impinging on reader’s rights, and the growth of content distribution networks (read: Facebook, Apple News, RSS readers), I want to share how it feels to be a web developer.

Websites are complicated, but with thorough planning, complexities can be managed. Media companies often operate on a editorial calendar, which forces a perpetually reactionary state of building. In other words, developers are caught in a whirlwind of reactions: to urgent ad campaigns, soon-to-be published articles or published pieces requiring new features. Even developers with the best intentions, who know best practices of building optimized sites, are constantly under-fire. Business needs and the developer’s desire to keep a fast and clean website become inversely related.

First, working in a media company as a web developer is a lot more complicated than it looks. The process starts with a content producer’s desire to make high quality content for a loyal audience. The website is used to gather stories, edit, and publish. Developers spend time optimizing the website’s content for discovery (read: validate HTML, SEO and social sharing). Writers spend time researching stories and write on captivating topics. And editors and producers spend time preparing and shaping stories for their overall audience. These parts keep the editorial machine moving.

The best website can become bloated when advertisers add their own tracking to each ad.

For established brands, companies prepare direct-sales plans, during which publishers create ad inventory. Ads are sold on the tune of unit-per-thousand. This means a thousand impressions of the advertisement are sold at a single price. For example, $15 per thousand impressions. In most cases, the advertisement inventory is sold based on a contractual agreement between the advertiser and the publisher. The agreements are based on common requirements from organizations like the IAB, but can also include specific requirements, per-advertiser. As a result, inventory pricing and qualifications can vary.

Requirements around inventory can vary greatly. Definitions have only been getting more stringent in the past years. Requirements around viewability, conversion, and targeting are important for advertisers. Billable impressions require a rendered ad to be have at least 50% of the creative in-view to the user for at least 1 second. Conversion and targeting is based around certain agreed clicks on the ad or specific types of users. In regards to demographics, advertisers can specify contracts to require traffic to be domestically based, targeted by age, or catered to user interests.

Publishers are responsible for providing the space on their webpage to render the ads. These predetermined places on the webpage are reserved for ads and packaged as available inventory. The actual placement for these ads are agreed upon based on interests from the editorial designers, as well as the business team. The editorial influence seeks to protect the diginity of the site’s content. The business team considers the various parameters that determine a valid ad impression, and seek to reduce the wasted page-view opportunities.

The techniques around tracking user activity have entirely changed in recent years. Media companies employ countless individuals responsible for understanding on-site behavior. Oftentimes, using 3rd party tracking services, such as Google Analytics or Omniture, publishers track the top-level site metrics around traffic activity. The basic metrics to watch are unique viewers, number of page views, and referrer traffic. Advanced software is implemented to gain further insights to help editorial parties understand their progress in order to grow their audience.

The collected data is used to target company specific performance indicators, often driven by business needs. The larger the organization, the more tools are used to infer insights from the existing site traffic. The more 3rd party tools a business group can implement on the website, the easier their job becomes. Unfortunately, the methods for implementing these tools are not always ideal.

Traditionally, the addition of 3rd party tools is facilitated and monitored by the web developers. With new tools, such as Tag Managers, 3rd party tools can be added in the form of scripts, without the notice of developers. In the immediate, this solves a problem for the marketing and business group, who need to gather data on a tight turnaround. For the developers, the practice of haphazardly adding scripts can counteract the attempts to improve the website’s performance. Because the number of people who can add scripts to the site is uncoordinated, this can lead to unnecessary overlapping functionality.

In the worst cases, the publishers who create partnerships with brands for ad inventory sales are inundated with unnecessary bloat. Each advertisement on a webpage comes with its unique set of creative assets and tracking files. While a publisher may have its own set of site traffic tools, each advertisement may also contain their own.

The combination of 3rd party tools, business intelligence tracking, advertisements, and advertisement specific 3rd party tracking tools create a path of unmanageable complexity.

The rubik’s cube of ad supported websites.

Given these circumstances, there isn’t a clear way forward. Simplifying the website’s permitted scripts or restricting the tooling used by the website isn’t always an option. The growth of an organization often ties directly into the increase in unnecessary scripts and stake holders

No wonder content distributors are gaining traction. Content producers will never be entirely out of business, but the profit margins continue to thin. The distribution channels that can leverage content feeds, such as RSS or Facebook, can create frameworks that control the entire tracking, ad serving, content loading, and user platform.

I imagine in coming years, media companies will re-approach the importance of highly performant websites. The difficulties in managing the on going complexity are solved when engineering influences are prioritized in business level discussions. I’m excited to see how tech teams reshape the digital media landscape. There’s a lot of interesting stuff ahead.

Thanks to Jihii Jolly, KC Oh and Alex Godin for editing and ideas.

Thoughts on Media is a community publication on Medium, curated by ReadThisThing.

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On print and digital news consumption

November 6, 2015 by rememberlenny

Wednesday and Thursday, I decided to read a print newspaper on the way to work. This set off a Twitter discussion with Alex Remington.

https://twitter.com/lamthuyvo/status/662678353040834561

Wednesday, I picked up a free WSJ before getting on the subway and spent my 40 minute commute paging through the domestic, international and business sections. Thursday, I bought a NYT late edition and spent my crowded morning commute fumbling through the stories with a folded newspaper under my arm. Even through the pain of navigating a newspaper on the train, I came away feeling informed and connected to the world around me.

I always knew that there was a huge difference in reading the news in print and online. This experience heightened my awareness. Print content is contextually laid out. Digital content is consumed in isolation.

The presentation of articles intertwined amongst one another is a powerful design structure. Online, articles on a feed or website are expected to be an isolated piece of content. Any ads, recirculation modules, or call-to-action pop-ups are annoying.

On a newspaper, the front-page’s brief exposure to a number of articles is immediately valuable. By scanning the page, I am immediately informed about a number of topics, and can make my own decision to continue reading.

The digital equivalent lacks an effective solution for the “scan-and-chose” experience. Editorially curated index pages are dead. People find content through their preferred link feeds; be it Facebook, RSS feeds, or some link aggregator. People expect to find a link they want to visit, then click it with the expectation of exploring that content.

The design principle of adding content in the middle of these article is synonymous with “taking away the users attention”. Placing links to other content in the middle of an article is a surefire way to reduce article completion rates and increase bounce rates.

Still, the experience of reading a print newspaper article and being able to transition to another article is a great experience. The closest equivalent online is an infinite scroll article that transitions you into another article before you know it. It feels sneaky and KPI driven. The newly loaded article is a new ad impression opportunity and page-view. The problem is that the metrics that drive the digital businesses’ feel like they lead the design principles.

So the question stands, with all our digital content, what do users want and how do we give it to them?

https://twitter.com/alexremington/status/662338293258825728

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October 30, 2015 by rememberlenny

Can’t finish a New Yorker story online?

The remind-to-read tool was developed by New Yorker senior software engineer Leonard Bogdonoff, who began working on it as a personal project outside of work. He plans to make the code behind it open source.

Bogdonoff began thinking about the glut of content produced online every day, and how easy it is for readers to save articles to Instapaper or Pocket and forget about them — or to just be overwhelmed by the continuous stream of posts on social media.

“I wanted to play with this aspect that people knew what they wanted, but the current mechanics don’t allow for people to actually engage with stuff that they know they want,” he said.

– From Joseph Lichterman’s, Nieman Lab article

/2015/10/30/cant-finish-a-new-yorker-story-online/

Remind to Read launched on the New Yorker 1 week ago

October 28, 2015 by rememberlenny

Me:
remember the sendlater thing I was working on?
Im making an email interface
so you email the service with an email address noting how long it should wait, then it sends you an email after that length of time
ie. [email protected]
or [email protected]
you preregister, so it recognizes your email address and then replies back

JJ:
ha thats funny
why are you making it again

Me:
i use email to “hold on to” things that I want to go back to
instead of evernote or instapaper
so I want to create a way to buffer an email

JJ:
you know the app mailbox?
it does that – when you get an email you can tell it to send it again later

Me:
yep
this is more from a desktop standpoint
or even if its not an email you are receiving
ie, using the mail to function
or copying content and then sending it to yourself

Why publishers need a way to remind to read

October 27, 2015 by rememberlenny

Publishers have lost their grip on audiences. The content they produce is circulated on platforms they don’t control. The ads they sell are priced by market places they don’t control. The business models and rules by which they play are no longer in their favor.

I believe there are two “modes” of content consumption that users go through: discovery-mode and engagement-mode. The discovery stage is when users are browsing email, looking at link-aggregators, scrolling through social feeds, etc. They are combing through the bulk of content available and looking for signals. This is not the time for people to engage heavily with content. For publishers, this type of user activity is filled with high bounce rates and low time-on-site.

The engagement stage is when users are ready to read and watch. This is when they are prepared to allocate time to focus. This can be before work, during a lunch break, in the evening or weekend. During these moments, people are more likely to finish content they are interested in and less likely to get distracted. The goal is to help users cultivate this mode of content consumption.

Most people who save content, use a bookmarking tool that eventually becomes unmanageable. People in the discovery mode save a bulk of links to read later, but never come back. Eventually people develop a ritual of finding all the good content they want to bookmark without ever allocating time to return. After a tipping point, tools like Pocket and Instapaper eventually become a bucket of links that are never read or visited.

Publishers should be providing more outlets for engaging the user who expresses interest, but doesn’t have time to stay.

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Developer

September 18, 2015 by rememberlenny

Recently, I had lunch with a aspiring developer who reached out to me online. He was deciding whether or not to enroll in a web development bootcamp, and decided to ask my opinion. Up to then, he had been a freelance web developer and even employed off-shore contractors to build him a legitimate Instagram marketing service. His service was straightforward, simple, and making money.

I realized how my drive into the technical aspect of products have taken me away from the perspective of solving problems that people will pay for. Instead, I’ve spent most of my time exploring software development as a passion.

I started a series of projects this year that I have taken from idea to product. I released an update for my iOS app, built a community platform for sharing breakup stories, made a low-cost VR story builder platform, released a chrome extension, explored a social network based on the twitter network graph, and launched a delayed email sending widget for publishers.

Everyday, I’ve enjoyed exploring the problems associated to building a product that didn’t exist. I’ll pull out my computer to and from work and work on side projects. I figured out what skills I didn’t have and tried my best to learn them to make a service that other people could use. In each case, I was trying something new, that I couldn’t have done before.

I’ve gotten to the point in my explorations where I want to do more. My first few years of professional web development was focused around contracting. Through contracting, I was able to accumulate skills that provided employable skills. From there, I was able to freelance and deepen my understanding my value as an employee.

I became an expert of WordPress websites, learned to make stores, set up virtual environments, configure servers, mastered concepts surrounding best practices, identified how to keep up with trends, developed a rhythm for learning, and regularly attended meetups, conferences and hackathons.

After a number of years as a web developer employee, I found myself pushing away freelance projects and focusing on personal projects. I deepened my understanding of software that wasn’t immediately valuable, but would be important for seeing my ideas to fruition. If I wanted to make a social network, I learned how. If I wanted to make an iOS app, I understood the options and pursued the best route.

Through this, I learned Ruby, developed many rails applications, used front-end frameworks, built my own set of prototyping practices, became obsessed with workflow process, identified the fastest and cheapest ways to launch products, and began showcasing my past work.

As a front-end developer, I remember learning about mobile development and being very confused. I started learning frontend css frameworks to understand best practices and began identifying the common solutons to a responsive web. I learned how to use CMS’s and began regularly making WordPress websites. From there, I had begun reading about API-first development and didnt know how the tools I knew would let me build any application. The concepts made sense, but I didnt have the toolchain to do it. So I learned how to use node and rails and explored the different options. As I encountered problems or questions, I would identify the solutions and then learn them.

Im feeling like the next step is to build things with people that solve problems people will pay for. Its not a huge step from where I’ve been exploring. My attention recently has been lost on the “newest and best” programing languages and trends.

I have passed the point where I feel the things I don’t understand will have a significant improvement on what I can offer. Im ready to start working on projects that fill needs that people can’t fill themselves.